film Home > Movie Reviews

After being sacked from his Glasgow shipbuilding job, Frank (Peter Mullan) goes into a midlife funk also fueled by regret about his son’s early drowning death and estrangement from his surviving son (Jamie Sives). Lucky for Frank, within driving distance from Scotland is the English Channel, which is just waiting for a 55-year-old guy to swim across so as to not only solve all his problems to the accompaniment of sub-Richard Thompson guitar doodles but also to serve as inspirational example to his small circle of Glasgow working-class bobbins. Among Frank’s more remarkably dim pals are Billy Boyd’s Hobbit-like turn as a near-imbecile who can’t get laid and a Chinese cook (Benedict Wong) who can’t summon the nerve to tell a thug not to drop his potato sack (don’t ask). Anyway, will Frank make it across the Channel? After the success of The Full Monty, do you have to ask? But predestination aside, how pornographically uplifting is this by-the-numbers working-class zero of a movie? Try this: Frank is also motivated by watching real, severely crippled kids try to swim. Movies that use real crippled children to get your sympathy—isn’t there a special circle of hell reserved for such things?